As my quest for non cis-het-white-male spec fic authors continues (now and forever abbreviated as Non-CHWM) I delve into the worold of Malka Older in Infomocracy. In this novel, we follow several characters as they navigate a world where the internet is run by a single entity called Information and the world government has been broken down into micro-democracies with hundreds of political options to be voted on to run your small corner of the world, and a super-majority government that sees to the inter-governmental interactions. What follows is a fast-paced and rousing political intrigue including, but not limited to, election tampering and natural disasters.

I have to say, the plot, the characters, and the writing are all phenomenal. Older does a fantastic job making sure you don’t get lost between jumps of characters, helped along by the fact that they span a world’s worth of ethnicities and so have vastly different names and identities that help the reader keep them separate. No, where I struggled with this novel was in the world building.

It took me a long time in the novel to pin point where my feelings of disjointed-ness were coming from and an even longer rambling rant to my husband to figure out what exactly it was that wasn’t working. The problem was two-fold: there were too many small unnecessary details thrown in each time we changed global locations, with a lot of new food and clothing and vocabulary that was hard to keep track of and instead was a distraction from the plot. That’s not to say that ethnically appropriate details should be omitted, just that in this instance there were just too many and the changes between locations was too fast and too abrupt for me to be able to even begin to grok the local cuisine, let alone figure out why the knowledge of it was relevant to the story.

The second problem was that I just did not believe the technological aspects of the novel, or that the micro-democracy as it stood would ever be functional. On the political side of things, it felt like a thought-exercise for a political philosophy class was put into action, but had no real basis in reality for surviving. I would have expected it to have dissolved into anarchy and infighting between the microcosms long before the twenty years it had survived thus far in the novel. It’s the same problem I have with books like Divergent; I just do not believe humans would suffer that political system without rebellion and pitchforks. It reminded me a lot of Snow Crash in its attempted feel, but without the elegance or feeling organic like Snow Crash. But on to the technological problems…

The world supposedly revolves around a version of the internet referred to as Information: an unbiased, and ungoverned, controlling bureaucracy which handles all world-wide communication, dissemination of knowledge, and voting. Everything, and I mean EVERYthing is routed through Information, including social media, payment, etc. **SPOILERS** At one point in the novel, Information is compromised and everything goes down except for Information’s intranet and a few other intranets that have been set up, but they can still access data from before 3 weeks ago, or essentially, cached data. But that’s just not how the internet works. It’s as if the entire thing suffers a giant DDOS attack, but Older doesn’t really explain how it’s attacked, why it fails, or even really how they get things working again, and as someone who works in a technological field, the entire concept and proposed reality of Information drove me NUTS. When it was a passive background part of the world I was like, okay, fine, sort of 1984 Big Brother, but whatevs, and then it gets compromised and I was like, “NO…WAIT…STOP. THAT’S NOT…NO…STAHP PLZ.” **//SPOILERS**

All that being said, I enjoyed the interpersonal stories, and the political intrigue and the writing itself was amazingly fun and it kept me turning pages regardless of its flaws, so that should show you how strong the other elements in the book actually are. If you don’t mind technological hiccups, or wouldn’t know a cloud computational solution if it bit you in the butt, then you would really enjoy this novel and not have any trouble with it like I did. However, if computers or poli-sci are your life, I would probably steer clear unless you like yelling at books…